Thursday, 27 July 2017

June Foray, the voice of “The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show’s” Rocky the Flying Squirrel and his nemesis Natasha Fatale of Boris and Natasha fame in the early 1960s and a key figure in the animation industry, died Thursday. She was 99.

[...]

Foray was also the voice behind Looney Tunes’ Witch Hazel, Nell from “Dudley Do-Right,” Granny in the “Tweety and Sylvester” cartoons and Cindy Lou Who in Chuck Jones’ “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” among hundreds of others.

The new White House communications director accused the chief of staff of leaking his financial disclosure form, a felony. It hadn’t been leaked, it had become publicly available. All of this happened on Twitter, of course.

A recess appointment could be made if the Senate goes into recess for more than three days and Sessions were dismissed. Would Donny do that? Will the Senate hold pro forma sessions to keep Sessions? (And who’s on first?) Would Donny pledge not to replace Sessions to avoid that? Would anyone in his right mind believe him?

Senate Republicans since January have blocked Trump from making recess appointments by holding pro-forma sessions every few days whenever the Senate is otherwise in recess. In doing so, the Senate is never technically in a period of recess that would enable the president, under the Constitution, to make an appointment to his administration that would otherwise require Senate confirmation.

In a pro-forma session, a senator quickly gavels the chamber in and out of session. It requires a senator to be present in Washington during the recess period, but junior members of the Republican conference early in the year agreed to perform this function for their colleagues, committing to dates for the balance of the year.

“Junior senators long ago picked two dates when they’re on the hook to be in D.C. to gavel in and out,” the GOP senator said.

Wednesday, 26 July 2017

There’s no love lost between NYC’s mayor and its police force. Witness this week’s events: Hizzoner decided to rub elbows with the plebeians by joining some of them on a subway ride. The cops have now released an email describing a removal of bums from the Mayor’s path. Who ordered it and whether it was carried out remain unknown, but no one will much care.

Kevin Williamson marks the Bork nomination as a turning point not just in judicial confirmations, but our politics more broadly:

Democrats of course had every legal and constitutional right to oppose Bork’s nomination for any reason they chose. Senator Kennedy’s denunciation of Bork was pure slander, but not in the legally actionable sense. Elected officials are allowed to get excited about whatever it is that excites them, and, if their constituents strongly disagree, then they have the means of recourse at their disposal. There’s an election every other year.

But the rules of the game are not all there is to the game. What in another context might be called “sportsmanship” is in politics a question of prudence and even of patriotism, forgoing the pursuit of every petty partisan advantage made possibly by the formal rules of the legislative and political processes in deference to the fact that governance in a democratic republic requires a very large degree of cooperation and forbearance. The progress from Robert Bork to Merrick Garland is a fairly obvious story, but there is more to it than that: The increasing reliance upon legislative gimmicks such as omnibus spending bills and retrofitting legislation to fit with the budget reconciliation process, the substitution of executive orders and open-ended regulatory portfolios (“the secretary shall ...”), the prominence of emergency “special sessions” in the state legislatures, the absence of regular order in the legislative and appropriations process — all are part of the same destructive tendency. Procedural maximalism in effect turns the legislative system against itself, substituting the exception for the rule and treating every ordinary item of business as a potential emergency item.

And the result today:

The recently proffered Republican health-care bill instantiates much of what is wrong with our politics: The bill was constructed through an extraordinary process in which there were no hearings, no review from the Congressional Budget Office, and no final text of the legislation until shortly before the vote. The process is erratic and covert rather than regular and transparent. It was put together in a purposeful way to avoid substantive debate and meaningful public discourse, making the most of the majority’s procedural advantages for purely political ends. The Republicans are perfectly within their legal authority to proceed that way. But that’s no way to govern. We all know this. As Rod Dreher recently put it, Republicans will have to choose whether they love the rule of law more than they hate the Left. Democrats faced the same choice, once, and they chose poorly, having set upon a course of political totalism that has seen the weaponization of everything from the IRS to the state attorneys general. Republican populists who argue that the GOP must play by the same rules in the name of “winning” have very little understanding of what already has been lost and of what we as a nation stand to lose. The United States will not thrive, economically or otherwise, in a state of permanent emergency.

Florida Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s top information technology (IT) aide was arrested Monday attempting to board a flight to Pakistan after wiring $283,000 from the Congressional Federal Credit Union to that country.

He attempted to leave the country hours after The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group revealed that he is the target of an FBI investigation, and the FBI apprehended him at the airport.

Credit union officials permitted the wire to go through, and his wife has already fled the country to Pakistan, after police confronted her at the airport and found $12,000 in cash hidden in her suitcase but did not stop her from boarding, court documents show.

This is a very strange story. A law firm which represents Bernie Sanders supporters in a class-action lawsuit against the Democratic National Committee (and against former DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz) received a call asking about the case. The caller’s voice was disguised, but when the firm checked the number on caller ID, it came up as one of Debbie Wasserman Schultz’ offices. From the court filing:

At 4:54 p.m. today, an individual called our law office from “305-936-5724.” See attached photo of the caller I.D.

The caller refused to identify himself/herself, but asked my secretary about the Wilding et al. v. DNC et al. lawsuit. My secretary stated that it sounded like the caller was using a voice changer, because the voice sounded robotic and genderless — along the lines of the voice changers used when television show interviews are kept anonymous. The caller concluded with “Okey dokey,” after my secretary gave the caller public information about the case.

After the call ended, a simple Google search of the phone number “305-936-5724” shows that it is the phone number for Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz’ Aventura office ...

The filing contains an image of the caller ID showing the phone number and a link to a contact page for Wasserman Schultz’ office with the same number. So, at least at first glance, it appears the call did come from her office.

Such ex parte contact is forbidden. Doing it this way is self-defeating ... and hilarious.

President Trump tweeted Wednesday that the U.S. government will not allow transgender people “to serve in any capacity in the U.S. military.”

In a series of tweets, he wrote:

“After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow ... Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military. Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming ... victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail. Thank you.”

This was the right call. There are limits to our compassion for the afflicted. These few individuals are a net minus.

A silly response from an unexpected source:

I don't disagree with Trump's policy decision on transgenders in the military, but why not allow Mattis to lay it out?

The Department of Defense Inspector General has launched a criminal investigation into the procurement of Afghan National Army uniforms, the Pentagon’s top investigator for Afghanistan reconstruction told a House panel Tuesday.

[...]

Sopko was called to testify after his office’s June report found that US officials managing the Afghan effort had approved a contract for ANA camouflage uniforms that were unnecessarily expensive and whose forest pattern was inappropriate for the Afghan fighting environment, which is largely desert.

In 2008, according to the report, Department of Defense officials issued a requirement that ANA uniforms make use of a proprietary Spec4ce Forest camouflage pattern developed and owned by a Canadian firm, HyperStealth. SIGAR found that since 2008 the uniforms, which also had extra features like zippers, cost US taxpayers $28 million more than uniforms that could have been produced using environment-appropriate, DOD-owned camouflage patterns. The report also projected that the uniform contract would cost the US $71 million over the next ten years.